The Jobs way

THE JOBS METHOD
What I learned from Steve is the minimalistic approach. His vision never left Apple in the 10 years that I was with the corporation. We never licensed a technology, and launched only a few products every year. The focus was on the simplification of user experiences built into the systems. If you look at the methodology that Apple uses even now, that has not changed. The technologies are more powerful and miniaturised. We are now in the digital era, but back then it was an era of empowerment and productivity as well. Apple has always been about the user experience.

BEAUTY OF FEW
Steve always used to say, ‘It is what you leave out and not what you put in.’ His focus was always on how many steps you could remove in a process. Most tech companies ask, ‘How many features can I add in the next release?’ Here was something completely different. Apple is unique because the CEO has a designer’s view of the world [as opposed to a technocrat’s view]. At Apple, technologies are created by a handful of people. There might be less than a dozen people who created an iPhone or an iPad. There are many involved in the deployment, but the actual creation required a very small team. Leading a small team, where design is the priority, makes Apple unique.

THE IPOD INSPIRATION
When Akio Morita was at Sony, Steve and I used to meet him. He was similar to Steve, who admired him tremendously. Morita was the person who took the decision on the Walkman. That was in the analogue world. Even when we moved to digital, Sony continued to behave like an analogue company. Such companies always began at components and were broken into functional organisations. It wasn’t Sony that created the iPod, because the device was about user experience and systems—it did not fit Sony’s leadership model. There were too many separate organisations with no one in charge of the complete design, so no one simplified the experience. Sony has hundreds of products, and Apple has only a handful; yet Apple is more valuable than Sony.

WORKING WITH JOBS
I was recruited for two purposes. One was to keep Apple commercially alive for three years to allow Steve to develop the Macintosh and launch it. At the time, Apple was being outsold by Commodore Business Machines, Atari, and IBM, whose personal computer (PC) was coming up rapidly. Apple III had arrived when I joined. It had failed. One priority for me was to market Apple II, which was nearing the end of its life. There was no tech requirement; it was pure marketing and management. We managed that successfully.

The second thing that attracted both Steve and me was that we were convinced that PCs would be sold like Pepsi and Coca-Cola. He wanted to understand how Pepsi, which was much smaller, managed to pass Coca-Cola in the U.S. to become the No. 1 packaged-products company. During my time [as CEO] at Pepsi-Cola, we did not focus on the product, but the experience. We had created a campaign called ‘Pepsi Generation’. We created a lifestyle that baby boomers could associate with. That is what Steve wanted Apple to become.

When we introduced the Macintosh, we never talked about the product or features. Its first commercial, aired during the National Football League Super Bowl, was about the incredible experience that was coming the way of users. If you see Apple today, they market the experience. No one really knows about what is under the hood.

HOW THE IPHONE BEGAN
Steve had designed a product called MacPhone way back in 1984. He had a model on his desk. It wasn’t terribly different from what he introduced a few years ago, but it was technically impossible to commercialise its production. The processors were not fast enough, designs had not been miniaturised, and storage was expensive. Steve was thinking about those products even back then. But he also had the vision to launch a product when the time was right.

If he had introduced the iPad a few years ago, it would have been impossible. The screen and processor technologies weren’t ready. Microsoft was talking about tablet computers eight years ago. Bill Gates’s future of computers was in tablets but it was a failure. If you remember, Apple tried Newton in 1992, and it failed. Inside Newton was a brand new processor that Apple cloned from ARM, which was spun off into a separate company. Today, every smartphone has an ARM processor. You should not only have the right vision, but be able to identify the moment to do something.

COMMAND AND CONTROL
Apple controls its own ecosystem. It does not just come up with products. Both HTC and Samsung are very competent companies, but they do not own their ecosystems. They do not have an equivalent of an App Store or iTunes. As the organisation grows, the problem is not the top management or people at the lower levels. It is always in the middle of the organisation. The reason is that in any organisation, they are empowered to say ‘no’ as rarely as they are empowered to say ‘yes’. In an era when you are scaling up business and it means doing what one was doing yesterday and doing more of it, it is fine. But when times are not normal and things are changing fast, this is a huge obstacle.

AN APPLE IN INDIA
As an outside observer, I see India’s left brain being highly developed: frugal engineering, the ability to adopt and execute, the ability to manage performance, and cost effectiveness. This is incredible. But to be an innovator like Apple, it takes both the left and the right brain.

In the right brain lies creativity and the courage to fail. As I look at India, I see highly talented people but no courage to fail. This is the biggest obstacle.

In the U.S., it is absolutely fine to fail—it’s part of the learning process. You cannot be an innovator unless you fail. If you do not fail, you could become a victim
of your success.

In India, I see penalties for failure. There are personal liabilities if an entrepreneur fails. We do not have that in the U.S. I see this more as a cultural barrier than anything else. But it is only a matter of time before the right brain starts to behave with the left brain.